Lopez - Week 5 - Supporting Ongoing Changes in Student Thinking

In Making Changes Visible and Supporting Changes in Student Thinking from Ambitious Science Teaching, best practices for engaging student-led thinking and reasoning around important science ideas are presented for teachers to use in classroom instruction. In Making Changes Visible, teachers are presented with a "toolkit" for strategies that teachers can use with students for students to construct and represent their own thinking in explaining science ideas. In Supporting Changes, the goals are for students to understand why the activity relates to the current content, to be able to connect the activity with a larger science concept, and the activity to provide context for the student to develop scientific knowledge.


In Making Changes Visible, I really appreciated the language and framing they suggested for presenting to students how to model scientific ideas. With fifth graders, my students often get stuck in the small details of drawing well or writing neatly and don't get to through the entire modeling. I think framing that Science models are intended to present an idea rather than look a certain way from the first day, will help students become better at modeling and drawing out their thinking. I especially want to use the Before, During, and After technique with my students. I also want to incorporate the sentence frames as tools for students writing, as well as when they verbally discuss their ideas with each other in small groups or whole class.

One aspect that I found really helpful from Supporting Changes in Student Thinking is the lists of back-pocket questions that they gave based on typical ideas and statements that students may share. I particularly liked the idea of "This is a question I want to leave you with..." I think this would be a great catalyst for student discussion and engagement.